Systemic Failure Of The Criminal Justice System.

One of the first duties of the State, one of the most potent arguments for the very existence of government, is providing safety for the citizenry. In an attempt to create that, the State has developed a criminal justice system whose explicit aims are - the deterrence of crime, the detection of crime, the punishment of crime, and the rehabilitation of the criminal.

If this system of connected agencies functioned correctly, it would be simply demonstrated by the merest glance at crime statistics. Alas, any criminologist will happily tell you of the many deficiencies in such data, and how they invariably require unpacking. Many factors play into crime numbers, and perhaps the least important part is the actions of the criminal justice system. Population growth, population ages, economic conditions, social mores and conditions, cultural shifts, and technology are amongst some of the factors that go into increases or decrease in crime. Not to mention changes in the way statistics are defined and collected. That said, we can see broad moves and judge whether the components of the criminal justice system deliver what we expect from them, and what we pay them handsomely for.

The police are the first line in our response to crime. You may be rather shocked to discover that the clear-up rate for crimes now stands at under 6%. So 94% of crimes are left unsolved by the police. Expanding on this, the solved rate for murder remains extremely high, the solved rate for property crime is incredibly low. But across the board, the police are just not solving crime. There are many, and complicated, reasons offered for this but at its root is the reality that the police no longer bother investigating crimes such as burglary. You'll receive a nice letter from Victim Support long before you see an actual copper at your door in response to a call. While campaigners complain that rape prosecutions are so low that rape is effectively decriminalised, the reality is that nearly all the crime that blights our lives is effectively decriminalised. The police are utterly failing to deliver the outcomes we demand and pay for.

Assuming you are one of the very few unlucky criminals to get caught and hauled before the Courts, you'll have the obstacle course of finding a legal aid solicitor - whose ranks have been decimated - and an available empty court with an actual judge in attendance. The backlog in trials now runs into years. This wreaks havoc on the lives of the accused and the victims alike. If the role of the courts is to judge those accused in a timely manner, the court service joins the police force as being a gross failure that has only got worst over recent years.

But let's assume you were unlucky enough to get caught in your nefarious deeds, and a lawyer, a court and a judge was found, and you find yourself carted off to the Scrubs. While we all have many and varied views on what prison is meant to achieve, reducing crime is on most of our lists, else prison becomes a hideously expensive empty performance. It is depressing, then, to realise that crime doesn't stop at the prison gates, that there are hundreds of thousands of assaults in prison each year. Prisons are riddled with crime, most of it unknown to the authorities.

Whilst we too easily shrug off what happens within prisons, prisoners are released. And on the measure that matters - reoffending - then the prison service returns to society people who have a 50% chance of reoffending. The economic cost alone of this reoffending is estimated to be 50 billions. If prison is measured by how it cuts crime, it has failed from the time we laid the first brick. By now it is horribly clear that the Golden Thread that weaves through criminal justice is failure. Failure by the police, failure by the Courts, and failure by the prison service. Individually and systematically they fall far short of what any reasonable person can expect from them - safety of our property and person. There is no other part of government that delivers so much failure for such a large cost. And while we may grumpily accept poor performance from other parts of government, failure in criminal justice corrodes the very sinews of society and dissolves the bonds between us. As political philosophers have long pointed out, no society can function if what one produces can be randomly appropriated by another.

As civilised as we may be, there remains deep within our species atavistic urges that require some censure and control by the State for the common good. We occasionally need saving from ourselves as well as other people. This is the primary state of government, and recent disorders remind us that when belief in the competence of criminal justice is eroded, some are disinhibited from cooperating with that system and maintain social order.

There is no simple remedy for these gross, systemic failures. There is no set of alternatives shining like a beacon in the darkness. All we can do, what we MUST do, is take the first step and admit the failures of criminal justice to cut crime. We will never search for solutions unless we can honestly look the problem in the eye.

In Defence of Billionaires

The populist vision of the wealthy being sons of Smaug, looting the populace to sit forever on a pile of gold is so utterly bizarre that I can only assume that such critics are utterly economically illiterate. Or communists.

Jeff Bezos, Sergey Bryn, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are totemic Bad Guys. (I wont include Musk. He relies on such high levels of debt and government contracts that his actual wealth can be seriously disputed). Because they have absurd levels of wealth. To give you a context - A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is over 32 YEARS. That is the scale of money we are addressing, levels beyond our imagination.

Critics of these people will have you believe that they have generated such fortunes by impoverishing others. That if their wealth was spread around the population the world will be a better place for it. Somehow. None of this is how capitalism works, it's not how business works, and it's not how finance works.

None of these people have a billion dollars sitting in their bank accounts, ready to be wheeled out on pallets at their whim. Because contrary to what their critics assume, billionaires aren't hoarders of money. They are CREATORS of wealth, And that wealth is not a dusty pile of gold, but rather is perpetually flowing around the financial markets, working to increase its value. It's in your pension funds, your pay-checks, and your mortgage payments, it helps fund government itself.

Billionaires spend money. This is the niggling detail critics overlook. Bezos spent $500 of his millions on a rather nice super-yacht, the world's largest schooner. I feel his pain; as a boat owner I am all too aware of the maintenance costs, the servicing, the mooring fees, the licences. Estimates have it that a super-yacht costs 10% of its costs to run - annually. That's $50 million dollars a year that flows from Bezos to the crew, marine engineers, fuel companies, port authorities, food suppliers, flag makers, and a hundred other suppliers of goods and services. That money goes to other businesses - and into the pockets of the employees. The company that built that yacht is itself very valuable, and its employees rely on the billionaires existing to spend their money.

Microsoft and Google underpin our lives, like it or not. Their existence has created over 400,000 jobs. That's direct employees. Employment that rests on the use of these companies products must reach the billions. All to enable people and companies to use their products to improve their outcomes. The value that Microsoft and Google has added to daily life is incalculable.

And yet there are seemingly endless critics of these wealth generators. Much seems to rest on an incoherent screech that it is inherently wrong for individuals to control such vast wealth. A more coherent and pertinent criticism rests on the amount of power that can flow from controlling so much wealth. Billionaires don't merely focus on their core business, some become more politically and socially active. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are dispersing their absurd wealth to charitable causes, old school philanthropy. People complain about the causes so endowed, especially Gates’ interest in healthcare. They can't win. If they sit on their wealth, they are wicked. If they spend it, they are evil.

This is just nonsensical. It signifies a disconnect between what billionaires do and what some believe they do. Not so far back in our economic development, it was accepted that the wealthy conduct good works. The likes of Carnegie built libraries and other causes for the greater social good. The landscape is littered with institutions commissioned by the wealthy. But this was when philanthropy filled in for the absence of government. We now have an expectation that government will fulfil all our needs, reducing the demand for private charity. We have a different outlook - We EXPECT government to do this. We DEMAND ever expanding government.

These shifts in our perception of government have warped our perceptions of billionaires and their social role. Wealthy individuals are seen as ‘bad’, and government is seen as ‘good’. The perilous basis of this belief in benign government contrasts with a belief in the malevolent view of the wealthy, and history tells us this faith is touching - but deeply corrosive on individual's freedom.

We need to treasure our wealth creators. Not because they can add a little flamboyant colour to a dull world, but because they benefit all of us with the way they put their money to perpetual work. Oh, and everyone forgets this detail - the super rich pay for around 60% of the US federal budget. All the services and aid we demand from government is largely paid for by the rich. We may be better served if we cut out the government middleman in this wealth redistribution and give the billionaires the credit they have earned.